New OpenAL implementation

Epic Games' Ryan Gordon, responsible for the port of many of the most popular PC titles to the Mac platform, recently unleashed his very own implementation of OpenAL, a popular cross-platform 3D audio API appropriate for use with gaming applications and many other types of audio applications.

Gordon's build features a number of improvements from OpenAL.org's implementation, among which we highlight:

Speed. This is currently the fastest AL implementation for OSX, even counting the new CoreAudio support in openal.org's CVS.

Contains optimizations for Altivec-enabled systems, but has scalar fallbacks for G3 and older systems.

Is designed with multithreading in mind...should be 100% thread safe, and can take advantage of multiple CPU systems internally.

Can handle multiple contexts on multiple devices, all running in parallel.

Supports the AL_ENUMERATION_EXT extension for device enumeration.

Supports AL_EXT_vorbis for direct playback of Ogg Vorbis audio; the Vorbis decoder is a highly optimized and Altivec-enabled fork of xiph.org's libvorbis-1.0...using this extension can be significantly faster and easier for the application than using a stock libvorbis and buffer queueing.

According to Ryan Gordon himself, while this release is indeed quite robust it is still in development and is not to be considered complete. While it is enough to play Unreal Tournament 2003 well, it is still missing some features found in complete OpenAL libraries.

Quote:Originally posted by willThimbleby Epic Games' Ryan Gordon, responsible for the port of many of the most popular PC titles to the Mac platform, recently unleashed his very own implementation of OpenAL, a popular cross-platform 3D audio API appropriate for use with gaming applications and many other types of audio applications.

Heh, I put a post into the news system as soon as I saw the info about it. Who did you ask to post it? Hope they don't feel bad that I had already jumped the gun.

Honestly, we definitely need an optimized, positional audio API for Mac OS X and this looks like a good step in that direction. He plans to keep patching it and bringing it up to date, so my thanks to go out to him.

I always wanted to get into OpenAL development when I was still doing all my crazy OpenGL stuff, but it was never really supported on the Mac at the time. Great to finally see a step in any direction really.